Eugenics Report/Post

Well as you may see by the title of this blog post/research paper its all about Eugenics. There will be information about its social and scientific origins, How, specifically, they researched it, and finally how it impacted America. I hope you enjoy this personalized article of Eugenics.

First of all i would like to explain what Eugenics are. Eugenics are basically in common men terms breeding of humans. The social origins behind it were that too many immigrants were coming into the country. When they would reproduce, some of their children would have mutations. The people in the upper class didn’t want “ freaks” in America so scientists came up with the idea of Eugenics. Scientists thought that this was okay because they were being funded by the rich. The children that were born would be sterilized so they couldn’t have mutated kids. That was the social origin of Eugenics.

The first scientific theory of eugenics was if you masturbated you were considered a degenerate and you would be sterilized. This was the sterilization law of 1907. In the mid 19th century scientists started to believe that certain environments caused degenerate heredity. They said that a good environment would change bad heredity into good within three generations. Anton Ochsner and Harry Sharp were convinced that social failure was a medical problem. This meaning that if you didn’t have a stable job, or any education then it was a medical problem. So they came to believed that degeneracy was caused by a germ plasma.

Eugenics research all started with Mendel’s laws of inheritance of human traits. Eugenic researchers attempted to trace genetics by a family tree or pedigree. While recording this genetics they altarted to make mistakes. They could do simple things like face shape but complex things as musical talent or intelligence were barely possible. Most of the data that eugenicists used were from surveys called ERO’s which are records of family traits. Were they went wrong was surveying people instead of looking at their traits in person.

Eugenics did many things in America. the first and major one was making us better educated. The next thing that it did was cool down the crime of that time. Finally eugenics tried to make America a pure race. this is my report on what eugenics are, the social and scientific origins, how they affected us, and finally how they were researched.

http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/